Awesome Kid Projects

Social Media–'Fueled' Car

Through a nonprofit called Minddrive.org, Kansas City high school students turned a 1967 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia into an electric vehicle that’s "fueled" by tweets, shares, posts and likes. This past spring, the at-risk students and their mentors drove the car from their hometown to the nation’s capital on a 12-stop tour. In order to make it the distance, the kids had to gain the “social fuel” needed to run the car; a computer connected to the drive train registered the wattage of specific social media interactions and allowed the car to move.